A committee in the GOP-controlled Senate plans to vote Tuesday on a bill that would make “attempting to usurp the power” of the Legislature or the executive branch grounds for impeachment.

Impeachment has “been a little-used tool” to challenge judges who strike down new legislation, said Republican Sen. Dennis Pyle, a sponsor of the measure. “Maybe it needs to be oiled up a little bit or sharpened a little bit.”

The proposal has considerable support in a Legislature in which Republicans outnumber Democrats more than 3 to 1. Nearly half the Senate’s members have signed on as sponsors. It’s unclear whether its novelty could complicate passage.

In case you’re just joining us, the state judiciary has ruled on more than one occasion that Kansas is not funding education at a level that is constitutional. A District court ruled in 2014 that the state legislature must increase funding for schools with disadvantaged students while the state Supreme Court just recently affirmed the lower court ruling.

I say this situation is not without precedent because Governor Sam Brownback threatened to defund the entire state judiciary after the initial ruling by the lower court in 2014. Additionally, the state legislature passed a law stripping the judiciary of its authority to appoint district judges, but that law was struck down by the judiciary, leading to even more threats against the court.

Republicans in Kansas have waged a multi-year long campaign to nullify and delegitimatize the state court system because respecting the court’s decisions would mean reversing course on the reckless fiscal policies they’ve adopted.

Kansas cannot properly fund education and a number of other programs because Governor Sam Brownback and his henchmen in the legislature have emptied the state’s coffers with generous tax cuts. And that’s putting it mildly. Businesses pay no income taxes in Kansas under the Brownback regime which has led to a wave of people declaring themselves businesses to avoid paying any taxes.

Republicans won’t rest until they’ve transformed every state into Jindal’s crumbling Louisiana.

Related

We can’t do that because some states (the legislators at least) are assholes and we have stop them from doing asshole things like not educating their people.

muselet

The one complaint the Rs in the Kansas Lege have made repeatedly is that the state judiciary has “overreached its constitutional authority.” To remedy this, the Rs propose to destroy the constitutional independence of the judiciary.

Let us all pause to appreciate the irony.

–alopecia

Victor the Crab

“Maybe now that people see what kind of tyrannical, repressive group of thugs these Brownback brownshirts are, they’ll start to turn out to the polls and vote for the kind of socialist utopian government that WE want to see running things!”
A fanatical far left firebagger, pre November 2014

Some people never learn.

Aynwrong

It’s interesting to me (in a morbid kind of way) that there are still conservatives who refer to liberal Massachusetts derisively as “The People’s Republic of…” when we have Right Wing governors and legislatures that are threatening to prosecute or to get rid an entire branch of their state’s government over a judicial ruling.

If it’s fair to compare liberal Massachusetts to North Korea, maybe we should start comparing conservative Kansas and Louisiana to Somalia. They seem to desire similar governing styles and they are certainly developing comparable economies.